National Center for Computational Sciences

The Department of Energy is releasing a record amount of supercomputing time, 1.3 billion processor hours, which has astrophysicists, biologists and everyone in between drooling in anticipation.

Starting in 2010, some of them will have the chance to run the biggest and most intricate simulations ever, creating experimental galaxies, plasma fusion reactors and global climates to help solve some of science’s most complex problems.

They’ll be competing for time on the Cray XT system “Jaguar” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the IBM Blue Gene/P “Intrepid” at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, two of the most powerful supercomputer facilities in the world. Unlike many of the DOE’s big machines, they’re dedicated to open, unclassified research.

“This is an incredible increase in computing power, which was itself a huge increase from the year before,” said DOE spokesman Jeff Sherwood. “It’s for research that would not be possible without petascale computing.”

In 2009, 900 million processor hours were up for grabs (a million processing hours would take 1,000 processors 1,000 hours, or around 41 days), but both computers received huge performance boosts this year. Jaguar’s processor count has shot up from 31,328 to 180,832, while Intrepid now boasts 163,840 from 32,768. Jaguar’s peak performance is now a blistering 1.64 petaflops (a quadrillion and a half floating point operations per second), making it the second most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

Continue reading at Wired.com.